Month: March 2018

You should know the peaches are rotting in a paper bag on the counter. Their funk now aphrodisiac for the fruit flies that queue on the screen, females agitated and anxious as they wait for the moldy juice to seep through and make a hole so they can lay their eggs. You’ll smell them when you collect your things, hear the wet larval pulse. That day you brought them home with a cabbage and two pounds of broad beans, you proudly lined them up in two blushing rows of eight, asking would the pie be done for dessert. They weren’t ripe and you bought the wrong kind so I told you to leave. So hard for you, isn’t it, to get even one thing right. To ask the sunbleached farmer which ones? The difference is heavy. Clings. Weighs me down more than the forgotten birthdays and flimsy gifts and your crisscross trails of dirty dishes sour socks unhung pictures broken vows. Twelve days ago I was going to make your favorite pie, maybe set the smallest peach aside to savor over the kitchen sink littered with fuzzy peels and brown bruises before weaving the buttery lattice (never lard—go to your mother’s house for that; you’ll have time for that now). Bite into sunset colored flesh and let the summersweet juice drip from my chin. Let the pit fall free into my hand, clean and woody, nothing to be sucked dry, reminding me of the day we kissed behind a knotted tree in the orchard’s last row, the day you promised me everything.

Kristen M. Ploetz is a writer and former land use attorney living in Massachusetts. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) with Random Sample Review, Atlas & Alice, Hypertext Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Harpoon Review,Crack the Spine, (b)OINK, The Hopper, Gravel, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a YA novel and a collection of CNF/short stories. You can find her on the web (www.kristenploetz.com) and Twitter (@KristenPloetz).

I was playing in the living room when I heard a loud growl coming from somewhere inside the house. I’d never heard this noise before–it was piercing, menacing, ringing in my head, and I wanted to hide myself underneath the couch cushions until either the sound went away or until whatever was making the sound came and ate me up. At that age, when I pictured burglars and thieves, I pictured shadows in a trench coat and a Sherlock Holmes hat, with bright white eyes and pointy nose–that was what burglars and thieves looked like in a poster on my neighbor’s window, reminding the neighborhood to beware. This character was in a circle with a big slash going through it like the Ghostbusters logo, except the ghost was a shadow trying to steal my Thundercat toys.

My mom wasn’t there in the living room when the shrilling noise sounded, and I hoped with all my might it was a burglar and thief–I hoped it was something like that, because I didn’t want to imagine anything else that could make such a horrifying sound. I didn’t want my mom to be eaten up. The sound went away. I wiped my tears. The sound came back. I started to shout. I ran around the living a few times and then through the hallway, to the bathroom where my dad was singing Old Man River while showering. I banged on the door pleading for him to save me, to save me from the monster coming from the garage. He opened the door, shouting, “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” I yelled about the noise, saying, “It’s coming to get me!” And my dad told me not to be scared and that everything would be okay, and it was just the dryer giving the signal that the clothes had finished drying. He ran, dripping wet and naked, to the laundry room and turned the dryer off before it made another buzzing noise. He ran back to the bathroom and wrapped a towel around his body. He picked me up and kissed my head.

“I thought it was going to eat us,” I said.
“Want some cornflakes?” he asked.
“I thought we were going to be eaten up by the dryer,” I said.

That night, I slept in between my parents–with one leg over my mother’s legs, and one arm across my dad’s chest. I never wanted them to go anywhere again. I wanted us three to stay in the bed for the rest of our lives.

They’re gone now. They’re nowhere near me. They aren’t in the living room, or kitchen, or the bathroom, or anywhere. That loud terrifying noise ate them up. I had arrived at the hospital with my friend’s mom. Brett, who was my only friend in First Grade, didn’t come — he stayed with his dad, while Mrs. Sall took me to the hospital. I was spending the night at their house. Mrs. Sall cried as she drove, and I cried with her.

“Head on collision,” was what the nurse told us.
I pictured their heads colliding, but I knew she didn’t mean that.

Eleven years later–I wash clothes at the Clean And Fresh for a living now. I wash them and dry them and give them back to smiling customers. And every time I hand them their shirts and pants and coats, telling them to have a nice day and to come back, I think about the first time I thought I had lost my parents.

Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Fiction Chapbook Contest), and The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India, 2013) which has been republished in the UK by Accent Press as The Sea Singer (2016). His first collection of short stories, Anklet And Other Stories was published by Golden Antelope Press in 2017. His novel, Pretend I Am Someone You Like, is forthcoming from the University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press. His stories and poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, New Orleans Review, NANO Fiction, Everyday Genius, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected to appear in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (&Now Books, 2013). Shome’s work has been featured as a storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story, nominated for The Best Of The Net, and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. He is a high school English teacher, living in Lafayette, LA, and his website can be found at www.shomedome.com.

When the second egg hatched a week and a half ago, Henry had been ready to destroy it again. But he remembered all those nagging feelings of guilt, strange guilt, murderous guilt that had eaten away at him at all hours, and he couldn’t do it.

He became a parent, instead. Feeding the little thing, trying various items around the kitchen, food from the gas station, a lot of different options, until he realized it preferred spoiled food. Any kind of spoiled food. He fed it with a Visine bottle the first few days, filling it with spoiled milk and going five and six drips at a time, watching it outgrow the paper towels he had made for its bed. Paper towels and then an old t-shirt and then, when it started teetering around the living room, he walked it to the guest bedroom and pointed to the bed. When it only stood there pulsating with a kind of slow inner energy and swinging one arm in sort of a droopy way, he picked it up for the first time skin-to-skin and carried it to bed himself.

His guilt was real and it was powerful. The first time he had syringed his sperm into an egg, it hatched a couple of weeks later and produced a blackened, warped version of the current homunculus. Henry had squashed it with a Tupperware bowl, put on his coat, and left for work.

For several days following the birth of the new homunculus, he told no one, but it started to well up inside him so that one afternoon, just before the lunch break, he grabbed his girlfriend Carmen and pulled her close to him. He shuffled with her until they stood behind the pop machine in front of the truck garage. It was obvious to Henry that Carmen didn’t believe anything he had told her so he invited her to come over and have a look for herself. Two days later, she knocked on his door.

He let her in and didn’t immediately answer when she asked about the smell. Instead he stood near a doorway in the living room with his head down, one hand worrying a thin patch of hair above his forehead. Finally he looked back up and offered an odd smile before taking a step sideways to let a short, slick-shiny creature step into the doorway.

The homunculus waved with its single, tube-like appendage. She saw her own hand going up for a return wave as if it was somebody else’s hand, an out-of-body reflex. She vomited hard and violently across the tops of her shoes. It dropped onto its stomach and darted quickly to where the vomit spread out onto the carpet. Henry’s eyes got wide and he jumped forward and grabbed the creature just before it started lapping at the mess. Carmen saw a small opening at the top of the homunculus, its head more or less, and something like a finger moving in and out of it. When Henry smiled at her again, her mind broke loose.

She imagined many different scenarios in which she helped Henry raise the little creature. They dressed it for its first day of school, went to baseball games and wore matching shirts that said CREATURE’S MOM and CREATURE’S DAD, helped it perfect parallel parking, and bailed it out of jail when it was caught with pot for the first time. These came to mind like old Polaroids, family life in squared portraits. In all of them Henry had his big smile and waved to the camera with two gelatinous arms. It smiled, too—a blown out hole in the front of its head full of jagged teeth the color of weak coffee.

Henry’s mind worked, too. It didn’t break, but it worked and worked in elastic terror. He imagined his own hope as a catalyst for change. Any kind of change had the chance of being a good thing after all these years. All he had to do was keep trying. He inspected the bright red welts across his forearms, the area he had balanced the body while carrying it across the room. No pain whatsoever. But the welts, three large spots in all, had developed into blisters since yesterday morning. And now he could see a sunflower-yellow pus just under the bubbled skin. He shifted his arms and watched the pus work back and forth inside the blister the way mercury will move in a level. All he had to do was keep trying, but the homunculus had disappeared into far corners. Somewhere in the house it made a noise like his heartbeat.

Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of four books of fiction and one collaborative chapbook of poetry. His stories and poems have appeared in New World Writing, Pank, Unbroken Journal, Wigleaf, and others. He lives in Pikeville, Kentucky.

They meet in the bathroom. It is only 9 o’clock, and they are beginning their nightly routine. It will not take more than fifteen minutes, ten, five. She wants the day over already, and so, even though she is not tired, she will go to bed. Lay her messy mat of curls on her pillow and lament that she hasn’t done the wash in over a month.

He will brush his teeth with his mouth wide open, seafoam dripping, great big white horse teeth open and wide and abstract art-like sprays of toothpaste mar the mirror and the wall and the faucet.

The next night:

They meet in the bathroom. She says she needs privacy. Why do you need privacy? I want to floss. So floss here. Do it here. In front of me. No. What do you need that I can’t give you Elise? What? And here we learn her name, but not his. Not yet. Is it important to the story? Possibly.

The following night:

They meet at eight o’clock. Without saying anything, they agree that the earlier they can go to sleep, the better. Some might call it avoidance, but she has collected – printed, snipped, saved – several articles on the benefits of going to bed early, if anyone should ask.

No one has asked.

She’d wanted a double vanity, but when they were looking at houses, their budget said, nope. No double vanity. No granite. No garage, just a carport. The realtor looked at them with pity. And also, your shower will be made of plastic and you will have one bathroom in the whole house. (The real estate listing said ¾ bath, so not even a whole bathroom.) That is what you can afford and that is what you will have and that is indeed, what they ended up with. So that now, in the space of their tiny bathroom, in the fug of overripe-pear-mildew, they brush their teeth at the same time. Now, of course they could take turns, but they decided to go to bed at the same time and it had not occurred to them otherwise. Elise could say, I will now put on my pajamas, then I will brush my teeth and wash my face, etc etc etc. He could feed the cat. The cat’s name is Lars and he too joins them in the bathroom, sitting on the back of the toilet, waiting to be pet on the head or scratched behind his ears. But they arrive in the bathroom at the same time. This is the program for the evening: brush teeth, wash face, put on pajamas, feed cat, sleep.

It is Tuesday. They will have sex.

Their mouths will taste like peppermint. He likes this and she does not. In fact, she would rather not kiss at all. Just get it done with. Then she can proceed with laying her dense head on the unwashed pillowcase on the pillow stained with who knows what. She tries not to look when she changes the sheets. Does all that come from her? Her mouth? Is it her brains oozing out? Why are the stains on the pillow yellow? Really, more of a light rust color; is she rusting away? Her own saltwater turning her body into flaking metal?

Bernard is coming. See, now it is time to name him and did you not expect “Bernard?” Bernard is handsome and able to come just by thinking about a Big Mac. Bernard is younger. He was considered the catch in the relationship and Elise didn’t know about the catch and return laws, so she kept him. This was a mistake, but only now, only looking up at herself in the mirror above the dresser, only now seeing his baboon back-side as he thrust into her, only now, tasting the mint – that encroaching weed, in his mouth as he searches for her. She isn’t there. She’s in the mirror watching Bernard and the ur-Elise.

Wednesday:

They meet in the bathroom and Elise says she has to pee. Ok. So pee, Bernard says as he spreads the toothpaste on his brush with the bristles flayed. He really needs to replace his toothbrush, Elise thinks, but doesn’t say. She’s not his mother. Elise says, never mind, I don’t have to go and with his toothbrush sticking out of the side of his mouth, Bernard pulls down his pants, and takes hold of his penis and pees. Hole in one, he says triumphantly, which Elise can’t quite make out on account of the toothbrush in his mouth, but she knows what he said. He says it every night. Has done since their honeymoon, after a long day of him out golfing and her at the spa. He spent seven out of eight days golfing while they were on the Yucatan peninsula. He regaled her of his day and how he got a hole in one with his new friends Marco and Raul, and he was peeing at the same time and the irony of that meant his joke would go on for years. Eight years now.

So in any domestic tragedy, we see ourselves. Where do you see yourself? Are you the catch? Are you the one who planned the honeymoon and did he say he didn’t care where you went as long as you were together? Do you have a bathroom with a double sink? Do you have two sinks, but live alone?

Bernard and Elise will be married for twenty two more years. He will die first. Many will attend the funeral. Elise refuses to say anything, to eulogize. Everyone thinks the sadness is too much to bear.

The night of the funeral:

Elise brushes her teeth alone. She picks up Bernard’s toothbrush – not the same one from two decades prior, but still it needs replacing, again, always. She will throw it out in the trash can under the sink. Then after she flosses, she plucks the toothbrush from the garbage and runs her fingers against the bristles. They’re still a little damp. She runs it against her cheek. It’s cool and tickles. She likes the feeling. She’s going to let it dry first, she decides. In bed, she looks at herself in the mirror. Her body takes up less than half the bed. It feels like an enormous bed, a big luxury, that she alone has such a large bed.

Jennifer Fliss is a Seattle-based fiction and essay writer. Her work has appeared in PANK, Hobart, The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com